Improve Business and Work-Life Balance Simultaneously
Many leaders believe they must choose between running an effective business and respecting the work-life balance for themselves and their employees. Focusing on leading workflow design and improvements can positively impact both business outcomes and work-life balance. We don't have to choose one or the other. Not to mention the fact that leading in this way can create a competitive advantage.1 Workflows are the roles, responsibilities, and sequence of activities performed by the people in the organization, or better yet, the Social Circutry2. They contain many unrealized opportunities for leaders, and most aren't focused on them today, creating an opportunity for those who want to set themselves apart from their peers. When leaders focus on workflows, they stand out by delivering more for the business and making their people happier; it's a win-win. First, I'll discuss why most leaders are not doing this today. Then I'll dig into how this can benefit business and improve work-life balance for everyone.
One reason this practice remains largely untapped is that operational processes are not viewed as a significant focus area for business leaders. In MBA curricula and business literature, the development and improvement of business processes are largely invisible. Today's leaders do not see this opportunity in the current training pipeline. As a result, very few companies pay sufficient attention to this aspect of the business. Most leaders don't know this opportunity exists because operational process design hasn't been at the forefront of what people learn and talk about in business. Workflow processes typically fall within the Business Operations focus area in MBA programs. Business Operations graduate degrees are sometimes coupled with Marketing or other functional specialties, as if that title alone would not generate enough material to learn from.
To understand this, I reviewed four of the top ten MBA programs3 and found that these institutions offered a total of 1,051 classes that students could take4. Of those, 109 were focused on operations, and only 19 highlighted business operational design. Only 1.8% of the MBA curriculum included content that future business leaders could leverage to improve their careers and impact business results through workflow or process design. Next, I reviewed the top business literature in articles and books recommended by experts and by popular demand5,6. What these articles and books focused on most was improving the leader's self-awareness, personal mastery, vision, strategy, leading change, transformation, communication, influence, team building, collaboration, decision-making, accountability, and so on. Doing the hard, unglamorous work of building operations to deliver value to customers is underrepresented in publications and business school curricula. It is no wonder most leaders are unaware of this opportunity. This is the backdrop that sets the stage to stand out as a leader.
A developmental style leader who leads workflow design and management can create a competitive advantage for their business.1 This kind of leader is a servant leader who values personal growth, teaching, mentoring, and learning. They also have a longer-term view and realize that learning something today can still have value even if it doesn't contribute to this quarter's revenue. Microsoft's leadership under Satya Nadella has kept it at the forefront of the AI revolution. His vision and push for learning exemplifies this style as he worked to shift their culture from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all”.7 The opportunity to create a competitive advantage and deliver ROI has presented itself more recently due to the increase in the complexity of business operations.
Consider the automotive industry as an example of increasing complexity. Decades ago, cars didn't have power assisted steering or brakes. It used to take some brawn to make a U-turn with manual steering. Initial electromechanical automotive innovations began with electric windows, door locks, and side-mirror adjustments, followed by audio innovations such as 8-track players, cassette players, and AM/FM stereo radios. Finally, the digital age brought a host of innovations, such as CD and DVD players and Bluetooth enabled devices. Today's cars have many more complex systems than those of yesteryear. Automotive innovations have led to the development of ECUs (Electronic Control Units), which are microcontroller-based semiconductor devices.
ECU’s are being used to control:
A typical car today has somewhere between 30 and 150 ECU’s. Each ECU is programmed with its own software, and the number of lines of code is increasing rapidly.
Total number of lines of code in an automobile:
The complexity of architecting, designing, testing, and manufacturing automobiles drives the complexity of delivering these innovations. Fifty years ago, computer programming wasn’t a factor in cars. Today, it’s central to the vehicle's operation. The design of an electric window, moving from electromechanical to today's digital world, is more than 1,000 times more complex.8 This is just one area of innovation; if we consider all areas, it is easy to see why workflow processes are so complicated today. Furthermore, consider that innovation and the subsequent implementation occur at multiple levels of detail. The development workflow for an automobile will include device-level (ECU), subsystem-level (emissions), and system-level (car) architecture, design, test, and manufacturing workflows. Then, there are additional workflows for multiple product lines, factories, regulatory requirements, and geolocation variants. After development is complete, customer issues and field failures arise. This group of workflow processes, after a product is released, now have to upgrade their knowledge bases and training to keep up with the change and knowledge that has been created on the development side.
All these workflows need to work in concert to deliver valued cars to customers on budget and on time, while sustaining and growing the business. This is no small or easy feat. It’s not just cars; over time, innovation is driving additional complexity across all industries and changing how leaders need to lead. A leader today needs to be like an orchestra conductor, not a drill sergeant; their role needs to be different in today’s world. If done right, then work should look like an orchestra, organized, synchronized, and the music should flow like value does for an organization. Unfortunately, today's work environment often resembles an ant hill after being disturbed. Complexity is at the root of why leaders need to change their leadership approach to be effective. There needs to be a constant focus on how work is done to keep up and prevent burnout.
If we look at the nuts and bolts of workflow design. It is normal for some workflows to have a defect density of 50% or higher as the complexity of work increases. Defects are activities, methods, or tasks that have a problem.
Examples of workflow defects:
The impact of these defects can be high or low, but they exist in every workflow. A workflow with a defect density of 50% has a defect on every other step. For example, let’s assume a 33% defect rate, which is closer to the typical baseline for most complex workflows. On average, an employee in an organization completes 5 activities per day, each with 10 steps. Assuming 260 workdays per year, that amounts to 50,260 work steps performed per person per year. Of the 50,260 steps, that would amount to 16,736 defects each person had to address that year. For an organization of 1,000 people, the total number of defects for a year would exceed 16 million. That is 16 million things that went wrong that could have gone right with a better workflow design.
Defects in workflows arise when we either fail to notice them or tolerate them, and new ones continue to emerge every day. On the business side, defects slow things down and impact revenue, costs, quality, and the customer experience. On a personal level, working in environments with numerous defects is frustrating and can impact one's personal life. Everyone realizes that at times work bleeds into the evening, into family or personal time, and sometimes on weekends, but this should not be the norm. If a company has people consistently working nights and weekends, then they just aren’t doing it right. It is a sign that complexity is starting to overtake the current workflow design.
Burning out employees costs companies money and negatively impacts people's quality of life. On average, a 1,000 employee company loses about $5 million annually and about 800 years of Quality-Adjusted Life years.9 QALYs are a measure used to evaluate the value of health outcomes by combining both the quality and quantity of life lived. Extrapolating from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' estimate of 1.9 million total employment in December of 2025, the impact scales to $9.5 billion and over 1.5 million QALYs lost. Not to mention the impact on those employees' families. A study published in January 2025 found that 65% of employees experience some form of burnout.10 This is not work-life balance; it is work-life imbalance, and it is so unnecessary. To improve people's work-life balance in Australia, laws were passed in 2024 and 2025, granting employees the right to disconnect outside working hours. This means they may refuse to monitor, read, or respond to communications from an employer or third party. California introduced a proposal in 2024, with other states considering similar measures. If we are at the point of drafting legislation to address employee burnout, I think it is safe to say there is a problem.
There is a way to make things dramatically better. A Developmental Style leader that does the everyday leadership activities like creating a vision, strategy, goals, resource allocation, and then adds in leading the design, management, and constant improvement workflows can deliver more ROI for a company and help its people balance work and life better. Visualizing work in a workflow map, or the roles, responsibilities, and sequence of activities, is an effective way to identify and address defects. Doing this one thing improves both ROI and work-life balance. Providing effective leadership at every level, every day when a workflow problem arises, can make a company stand out. Leading from where the work happens enables businesses to continue adapting and changing as complexity increases. Keep in mind that when MIT analyzed what made Toyota so effective, it found that they had developmental style leaders and focused on workflow design. Toyota began by making looms to weave cloth or tapestry, but over time they learned to build cars using its management system and grew larger than the Big 3 automakers combined (GM, Ford, and Chrysler at the time). Their focus on constantly improving work enabled them to discover a way to deliver twice the output with half of the resources, a fourfold improvement relative to their peers. By designing, managing, and improving workflows, a leader also reduces in-process work inventory, just as Toyota did in its factories by applying the same leadership focus and workflow design principles. In fact, at a plant that Toyota took over from GM, they reduced in-process inventory from 2 weeks (336 hours) to 2 hours. I don’t know about you, but having 1/168th of the normal work inventory of tasks to do sounds good to me. While a similar reduction in our workloads probably isn’t achievable, it makes one wonder how much opportunity there is by organizing work differently and from experience there is more opportunity than you realize.
Increasing complexity and change have created an excellent opportunity for leaders to improve both their business and their people's work-life balance. In practice, most complex workflows have many defects. These defects consume work capacity, cause frustration, and require additional effort for those who have to address them. The great news is that if leaders roll up their sleeves and get into how work gets done, they can lead the effort to remove these defects, create work capacity, and accelerate work velocity. Furthermore, this work lays the foundation for scaling or growing a business in the long run. Be the leader your company needs and the one everyone wants to work for.
Do something today to improve your work-life balance. You won’t regret it. Have a great day and good luck in your work-life journey.
References